Thermoelectric effects and topological insulators

The recent discovery of topological insulators (TIs) offers new opportunities for the development of thermoelectrics, because many TIs (like Bi2Te3) are excellent thermoelectric (TE) materials. In this review, we will first describe the general TE properties of TIs and show that the coexistence of the bulk and boundary states in TIs introduces unusual TE properties, including strong size effects and an anomalous Seebeck effect. Importantly, the TE figure of merit zT of TIs is no longer an intrinsic property, but depends strongly on the geometric size. The geometric parameters of two-dimensional TIs can be tuned to enhance zT to be significantly greater than 1. Then a few proof-of-principle experiments on three-dimensional TIs will be discussed, which observed unconventional TE phenomena that are closely related to the topological nature of the materials. However, current experiments indicate that the metallic surface states, if their advantage of high mobility is not fully utilized, would be detrimental to TE performance. Finally, we provide an outlook for future work on topological materials, which offers great possibilities to discover exotic TE effects and may lead to significant breakthroughs in improving zT.